Children’s entertainment properties, particularly television series, are increasingly including characters with visible disabilities—that is, they use wheelchairs, leg braces, or crutches—as part of the main friend group portrayed on screen. They are shown living their everyday lives and participating fully in the group’s activities, modeling inclusion and normalizing disabilities for young viewers. Some examples: MixMups […]
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Just the Ticket
Rail stations, train lines, and railway museums are logical venues for certain experiential initiatives. Not surprisingly, a large percentage—although not all—of these ventures involve licensed entertainment properties that feature trains as characters, themes, or critical elements of their fictional universe. Four examples from 2021 and 2022 illustrate: Warner Bros. France paired with railroad company SNCF […]
The Numbers Are In
The toy industry is having a good year in 2021, as measured by the major public toy companies’ quarterly results to date. Some observers had thought industry growth would slow in 2021 after a significant bump in dollar sales in 2020, fueled by the need to keep families occupied during the COVID lockdowns. In addition, […]
Calm in the Storm
Meditation and mindfulness apps saw a spike in usage after the global pandemic hit. In the seven days beginning March 29, two weeks after the start of the lockdown in the U.S., downloads for such apps were up 25% from the weekly average in January and February, reaching 750,000 downloads, according to App Annie figures […]